


Morph

by TurtleTotem



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Abusive Parents, Alternate Universe - Teenagers, Animal Transformation, Animorphs AU, Canon-Typical Animorphs Warnings, First Kiss, First Love, First Time, M/M, juvenile delinquency, no animals were permanently harmed in the making of this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:55:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24591157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TurtleTotem/pseuds/TurtleTotem
Summary: Charles and his friends have been through a lot of awful stuff since the night they found a crashed spaceship, the night a dying alien gave them the power to morph and a chance to save their planet from invasion.a.k.a. Charles and Erik rob a candy store and have their first kiss.(On Tumblrhere.)
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Comments: 16
Kudos: 32
Collections: Cherik Week 2020





	1. Chapter 1

Charles and his friends had been through a lot of awful stuff, since the night they found a crashed spaceship and a dying alien. The night they learned their world was under attack, and received from the dying alien's hands their only weapon against the invaders—the power to morph. Morphing gave them the ability to take animal forms that were a thousand times more dangerous than their fragile human bodies, forms that hid their true identities from the Yeerks and let them absorb unbearable damage that would simply vanish when they de-morphed. Since that night, they had all endured amounts of pain, terror, guilt, and strain that probably should have killed them.

It hadn't killed them yet, but it had warped all of them—sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Charles's sister Raven had once cared too much about having the best hair and the most fashionable clothes, about being pretty and popular; now she was a fierce, unstoppable fighter whose bloodthirst scared them all, even if they wouldn't say it. Erik, who had always been sharp and steely, was ruthless and pragmatic to a fault, now—except how could it be a fault if it kept them alive, kept the human race alive and free?

And Hank… poor Hank suffered more than any of them, trapped in morph as a gorilla. Barring a miracle, he would never be human again. If only he'd been in a smaller, less exotic morph, the day that he couldn't get to safety until long after the two-hour deadline, perhaps he could have still been among people in some way—someone's dog, a wild bird, something. Instead he had to remain entirely hidden, entirely dependent on the rest of them for everything. And any wounds he sustained in battle had to heal the hard way.

As for Charles himself, he had nightmares all the time now, flashbacks—not so much to the terrible things they'd endured, but the terrible things they'd _done_. All the bloodshed and suffering, the lies and secrets. Was it worth it, if they succeeded? What about if they failed?

All of which made it very easy to forget that morphing could also be _fun._

Charles's claws clicked over the floor of the candy shop, a tiny noise to go with his tiny mouse body. Mice were nervous, hypervigilant little creatures, but Charles was an old hand at controlling the little rodent's instincts. Mouse morph had turned out to be almost as useful as his tiger battle-morph, if for very different situations.

It was also sort of neat. Charles couldn't say exactly why he enjoyed being so small, making his way through a world grown suddenly massive around him. Chairlegs like redwood trees, jellybean containers like granaries, expanses of black-and-white tile like the surface of an alien world. It made him think of a dollhouse, except that was exactly backwards. It was as if _he_ was the doll.

Outside the shop, he knew Erik would be getting impatient. More accurately, he would be getting worried, and masking it with impatience. It had taken Charles longer than he expected to get into the building; he supposed he should have expected that a candy store would be fortified against mice. Mice with human intelligence, however, were not so easily stopped, and Charles had finally made it inside, tick-tick-ticking across the whimsical tiles toward the security system keypad on the wall.

Up, up the enormous furniture, claws scrabbling and nose twitching at the tantalizing scents of candied fruit, peanut butter and _sugar, sugar, sugar_ —No, no time for a snack. Charles pulled his attention back to the keypad, which he could just barely reach by climbing the display of licorice behind the cash register. It had taken three weeks of surveillance to get the code, and Charles had repeated the numbers until he heard them in his dreams. Now he typed them in, throwing the weight of his entire body against the buttons.

 _Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep_. And— _boop_ , the security system disengaged.

<You're clear,> he called to Erik.

Within a minute, the lock on the front door turned and the door opened. Erik was terrific at anything machinery-related, including lockpicking, and that had come in handy just as often as mouse morph.

"Took you long enough," Erik muttered as he crossed the shop. "Are you all right?"

<Of course I am.> Charles crawled into Erik's extended hand, snuffling instinctively at his fingers, which smelled like Cheet-os.

"Of course you are." Erik rolled his eyes. "Are you going to demorph?"

<No. I've still got an hour and a half, and I'll have to reset the alarm when we're done, and go out the same way I got in.>

Erik grunted and slipped Charles into the front pocket of his jacket, over his heart. Charles could feel it thudding gently behind him. It was silly for him to enjoy that so much, but he did.

They slipped into the shop's back office. Charles had wondered if they would need to look for false drawer-bottoms, hidden safes—but no, the candy shop owner kept the paperwork for his activities with The Sharing right in his normal file cabinet, in a folder marked _The Sharing_.

"My mother's gonna kill this guy if she ever realizes how careless he is," Erik said lightly, pulling out the folder and turning on the nearby lamp so they could see what it contained.

<Not your mother,> Charles corrected.

Erik didn't reply, and Charles didn't push it. The woman everyone thought of as Edie Lehnsherr was a high-ranking member of The Sharing, the "community engagement" organization the Yeerks used as a front to gather hosts. Erik's mother was a Controller, a prisoner somewhere inside her own brain while a Yeerk lived her life. Cooked in her kitchen. Volunteered at her synogogue. Kissed her son on the forehead. If joking about "Edie's" ruthlessness against her subordinates kept Erik from losing his mind, Charles wasn't going to stop him.

"Here," Erik said after a minute. "That's what we need, right there." He took out his phone and took pictures of the pages. The pictures would be deleted later, once the information on them was memorized; they'd all adjusted their phone settings to prevent anything entering 'the cloud.' They couldn't be too careful.

<Anything else interesting?>

Erik flipped through the rest of the folder, taking one or two more pictures, but there really wasn't much they didn't already know. The candy shop owner was pretty new to The Sharing, and his Yeerk wasn't especially high-ranking.

<He might have more later,> Charles said.

"I was just thinking that," Erik said, a hint of excitement in his voice. "The guy shouldn't be able to tell we were ever here. As long as he doesn't change the alarm code, we can come back…"

But on their way out of the office, that all went wrong. In the dark shop, glancing over his shoulder, Erik ran right into a display.

A dozen different kinds of candy cascaded to the floor with a sound like an avalanche. Jars shattered, shelves flipped, boxes tumbled, and Erik's foot slipped on a bag of gummy bears. He fell hard, managing to turn so as not to crush Charles in his pocket.

<Are you all right?>

"Are you all right?" Erik asked at the same time. He sat up, surveyed the damage, and started swearing. "Do you remember what all this looked like? Can we put it back together?"

Charles crawled from Erik's pocket onto his shoulder, and surveyed the damage with a mouse's superior night vision. <Too many things are broken. We could work all night and he'd still know someone was here.>

More swearing. "Fine. Fine. Okay, then. This is what we're doing."

Erik crouched down and began scooping candy into his jacket.

<Erik… are you stealing candy?>

"Yep. Gosh, this poor guy. Some idiot kids broke in and robbed his candy store. Stuff like that happens. No reason to think they went anywhere near his file cabinet, though, right? Idiot kids stealing candy don't care about The Sharing's secrets."

Charles couldn't help laughing. <I'll help. You need to take enough of a haul that no one will question the story.>

He hopped off Erik's shoulder onto the floor and demorphed. Only when he was standing barefoot on black-and-white tile did he remember that neither of them had brought any clothes for him. He had planned to stay a mouse.

"Well, you're not gonna be able to carry much," Erik said dryly, looking him up and down.

Charles knew he had to be blushing. This wasn't exactly the circumstances under which he'd imagined Erik would first see him naked. Not that it was appropriate to think about that anyway. Erik could never feel that way toward him.

"Chilly in here, isn't it," Erik said with a smirk, and Charles gasped in outrage and turned away, covering his chest.

Erik snickered, and returned to filling his pockets with taffy and gumballs. "Get that bucket over there, start filling it up."

Charles dashed over to the bucket of lollipops, pulled out the styrofoam filler that kept them upright, and started sweeping chocolates, gummies and packages of Pop Rocks into it. The display cases under the cash register were full of chocolate truffles—was it locked?

Another horrible avalanche crash, and Charles jumped out of his skin, whirling around.

Erik grinned at him from the wreckage of a second display. "Verisimilitude."

Charles rolled his eyes. "Come help me get the truffle case open. They're my favorite; if we're going to steal candy I want truffles."

Erik, cramming packs of jellybeans from the second display down his shirt, joined him at the truffle case. He poked thoughtfully at the lock, then reached for a huge novelty lollipop. "Stand back—"

"Don't you dare!" Charles swatted the lollipop out of his hand. "You'll get glass in the truffles!"

"Oh my gosh, say that again. Come on, say it again, you sound so adorable when you say 'truffles' with that accent—"

"Shut up! Just open the lock!"

Erik squeezed past him to the cash register and pulled a key off a nail. "There. All the truffles your heart could desire."

Charles opened the case, grabbed one of the cardboard boxes used by the cashiers, and filled it to the brim with every flavor of truffle, stopping to sample his favorites. "Mmm!"

"Hedonist. You have chocolate on your nose," Erik said, grinning, and stepped forward to wipe it with his thumb.

For a silent, inexplicable moment, they stood there together, Charles's pulse pounding and his mouth full of chocolate, Erik's sleeve brushing his bare shoulder.

"We should go," Erik said, turning away abruptly. "We'll have to set off the alarm, for ver—versim—what I said before. Idiot kids would only have time to grab so much before they ran for it."

"I've got to morph again," Charles said. "Can't run out there like this."

"Back in my pocket you go, then."

They re-armed the security system, put mouse-Charles in the hood of Erik's jacket—all his pockets were full—and Erik went out the door, carrying the bucket and truffle box. The alarm went off behind them as soon as the door opened.

Mission accomplished.


	2. Chapter 2

Erik felt ridiculous, biking from the candy shop to Charles's house with stolen candy bulging everywhere and a mouse in his hood. He would have felt even worse if Charles's parents had seen him, but they didn't. It was pretty late, and their room was at the other end of the house, but it probably wouldn't have mattered. Charles's massive, ostentatious house never felt lived in, and in all the time the Animorphs spent there—mostly _because_ there was no supervision—Erik had seen Charles's mother and stepfather maybe three times apiece. The Yeerk in Erik's mother's head was a better parent than anyone in Charles's house.

"Raven's going to be so mad she missed this," Erik murmured as he closed Charles's bedroom door and dumped all the candy out on the bed. Raven, to her fury, had been sent to ballet camp for a week.

<I don't know, Raven's more of a salty-snack type.> Charles sprang out of Erik's hood onto the bed, and began examining their haul of sweets, whiskers trembling. Sometimes he was so adorable Erik couldn't stand it. It was even worse when he was human.

"Here," Erik said, and unwrapped the candy Charles had been fixating on—a square of peanut butter fudge. Charles fell upon with all the excitement his little mouse body could hold, his happiness an inarticulate thought-speak burble in the back of Erik's head.

Erik was about to suggest he demorph and they could spend the night watching movies and eating themselves sick, when he heard footsteps.

 _"Stop making all that racket!"_ shouted a man's voice, slurred almost beyond comprehension, and a fist pounded on the door.

 _But we aren't making any noise at all…_ Erik knew both Charles's parents were drinkers, but he'd never seen it in action before. Was his stepfather having delirium tremens or something? Or decided to mix something else with his alcohol tonight?

The useless moron kept pounding on the door, yelling about nonexistent noise, and Erik's hands drew up into fists. Tempting, sorely tempting, to show Kurt Marko exactly what he thought of him… but that would only cause more trouble for Charles later.

Charles, who had disappeared from the bed.

"Charles?" Erik hissed; no way could Kurt hear that through the solid wood door. "Charles, answer me!"

On the other side of the door, Kurt finally wandered off, snarling and muttering. Hopefully he'd go fall down a flight of stairs or something.

"Charles, he's gone, you can come out."

No reply. But Erik did hear a rustle of movement from under the bed. He dropped to his stomach to look, turning on the flashlight on his phone.

There was the little mouse that was Charles, trembling as his eyes threw back the light. When Erik reached for him, he scurried away with no sign of recognition.

 _Crap_. It happened to all of them now and then; the animal's instincts had taken over. Distracted by the candy, frightened by Kurt's bellowing, adrenaline had gotten the better of Charles.

"Eventually you'll remember you're not really a mouse," Erik sighed, following the sound of movement through the clutter under the bed. "At least we're not in battle or anything. And you've still got over an hour of morph time. No reason to panic…"

Uneasy nonetheless, Erik turned on the TV, turned out the light, and sat down by the bed. Dimness and stillness would help the mouse relax, and maybe a familiar movie would help draw Charles back to the surface of his mind, help him think human thoughts. Erik turned on one of the Lord of the Rings movies; Charles loved those. He sat still, his mind not on the movie but on the tiny noises of the mouse moving around under the bed.

And then he wasn't under the bed. He was darting across the far corner of the room, away from the human, into Charles's closet.

"Charles, come back!" Erik whispered, but told himself not to panic, it was still an enclosed space, he'd be fine, any minute now he'd hear Charles's thought-speak voice in his head apologizing—

Instead, what he heard was the snap of a mousetrap.

"Charles! Charles, _Charles_ —" Erik tore into the closet, fumbling for the flashlight on his phone, feeling a scream in his throat and a horrible disbelieving sick panic in his belly—

The screaming in his head wasn't just his, he realized, it was Charles, which meant Charles _wasn't dead_. Where, where—there, the mousetrap, shoved into a corner of the walk-in closet, sprung just off-center enough that the mouse inside it was alive, writhing in panic and pain.

"Charles, demorph! Demorph right now!" Erik's voice was coming out hoarse and choked with the effort of not screaming. He pried the bar off the trap, cradled the broken body of the mouse in his hands, searched desperately for some flicker of human intelligence in the creature's terrified eyes. "Charles, it's Erik, listen to me, you have to demorph _right now!"_

The little mouse body began to change, lengthening and thickening, fur and tail retracting.

Dimly aware that he was sobbing, Erik kept the horrific hybrid thing that was Charles's body cradled in his lap until finally it was human again, it was Charles gasping and shaking like a leaf.

"I'm all right," Charles said eventually. "I'm all right."

"Don't _ever_ do that again," Erik snapped, still holding Charles in his lap. "That was stupid, Charles Xavier. I can't believe you almost died like _that_ , after all the crazy alien monsters and ray guns we've gone up against—What the hell would we do if we lost you?" His voice broke. "What would I do if I lost you?"

"Well, you wouldn't have to put up with my 'sermons and moralizing' anymore," Charles said with a shaky laugh.

"Which probably means I'd have the lot of us committing war crimes and giggling in rubber rooms inside of a week." Erik's arms around Charles might be tight enough to hurt. He ought to let go. He didn't know how to let go. "You're the heart of us, Charles. The best of us. We can't lose you."

Charles didn't say anything, just reached up to brush the tears off Erik's face, his expression wondering and uncertain. And the next thing Erik knew, Charles was kissing him.

They didn't watch a movie that night, and they didn't eat any more candy.

When light through the window woke Erik in the morning, he rolled away from it to face Charles, next to him in the bed. He watched him sleep through the sunrise, beautiful and perfect and alive, and felt like the world itself had morphed into something better than it had been the day before.


End file.
